ask the ghost tree what time it is (2020-2052)

Sharing speculative techniques for culturing more-than-human worlds, through a matrix of places, materials, and connections for a traveling “exhibition” in 2052, presented by a team of curators who were children in 2020.

This project proposes a speculative intergenerational experiment in culturing survivable worlds within frayed forests and watersheds and across troubled oceans. Having begun quietly in 2020, through three decades this project will continuously co-compose and curate in unforeseen ways a long creative experiment linked intimately with shifting lands and the many forces, known and unknown, that comprise them.

Reflecting both known urgencies and the absurdly complex unpredictabilities of life on Earth going forward, this project assembles a planetary matrix of more-than-human curatorial “research stations” that include “knots” of human children (between birth–18 in 2020), large herbivores, and forests and their shifting shores. While gathering toward a global “exhibition” for 2052, this matrix sustains a network of stations through which to experiment and exchange practices and findings through on-the-ground conversations and workshops. Seeking better ways to support earthly places, this matrix shares ways to Ask the Ghost Tree What Time It Is and listen for unimagined forms of response.

Each curatorial knot of humans-grazers-lands-waters is responsible to “a forest” somewhere on Earth. Parameters of how the project defines “a forest”—and what it might mean to be responsible to such an entity—are bound to shift in the thirty-two years of the project’s duration. So too the parameters, hopes, and horizons of what it means to be alive on this planet—changing changing, relentlessly and inescapably. The project also attunes to the fates of other local species, wild and/or domestic —expecting that how we enact “species” will change, too. This project embraces unpredictable times and relations, following new questions and practices toward the year 2052, carried on by more-than-human generations of past, present, and future forests, fields, pastures, and shores. 

The project has continued to grow since its beginning in 2020, with local collaborations at and near the R.A.W., Kultivator in Sweden, and others involved in the m/other futures project that came together in summer 2021. At the helm of the team of curators-to-be is artist Moa Vrijman.

The first public iteration of Ask the Ghost Tree What Time It Is was nominated for the Prix COAL 2021: Forets. Details are in the catalog here.